Exactly, JL. And it's laughable how people get mad about construction on a private site that is only known nowadays because Knapp originally cleared the land and built a house. If Knapp hadn't built his house, then that little patch of land would just be another chaparral fringed slope on the backside of the mountains that nobody would ever bother walking to, like 9 million other spots.

Mr. Ford, why do you believe your own definition of the value of the trails and your preferred use of them should be granted greater importance than that of other users and done so through regulation?

While I can certainly appreciate your desire to use our local trails as a means of escaping the mechanization of modern life, there is no reasonable basis why your preferred use of the trails should be put before my preferred use as a mountain biker. Surely your feelings that mountain bikers "depersonalize the experience" for you is not a rational basis for reducing the rights of that particular group of users who also value the trails but for different reasons than you.

What a sight to see you, Mr. Ford, seek to define the preeminent value of the trails and then call for regulating and thus reducing the rightful use of them for other recreationists whose activities fall outside you personal approval.

Mr. Ford, you may have put in a lot of work into our local trails and I respect that, but volunteer work doesn't buy ownership.

That's an odd caption for the photo showing the fire investigators searching for clues. For a place purportedly being "the point where the Gap Fire began" it appears remarkably free from even the slightest trace of fire damage.